The Crisis of Our Time

Robert Pirsig’s book of 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, took the world by storm, selling over five million copies. When asked how he would account for this, Pirsig said that Zen was a “culture-bearing book”; that he just wrote down what he was thinking, and it turned out that everyone else was thinking the same thing. And what they were thinking was that our Western, scientific, rational mindset was making us crazy. In The Crisis of Our Time, Morris Berman argues that the source of this was the loss of the oral-poetic, or sensuous-mythological, tradition, that was effectively eclipsed when Socrates and Plato managed to replace the older Homeric tradition with the “Church of Reason,” as Pirsig calls it. Pure rationalism, says Berman, is barbaric; the alienation of people from their bodies, from true sources of meaning and integrity, has resulted in a host of evils, war and genocide among them. He points to the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy as an inheritor of the Homeric tradition, arguing for a sane (and erotic) life; and Berman also itemizes the contemporary backlash against our way of life, including the American desire for secession, and the rejection—by millions—of consumerism, techno-fetishism, and dead-end jobs. It is also a pitch for what has been called the “kinship world view,” as opposed to the narcissism and extreme individualism that has made our lives so empty, and so miserable. The Crisis of Our Time is a rousing attempt at a way out.<br/>"Rational self-interest is the animus for pursuing the American Dream. The cruel irony is that as Americans in general have modeled themselves in this image, they charge toward their own destruction. In The Crisis of Our Time, Morris Berman gives a fascinating account of how we are not only no longer able to understand ourselves through stories and poetry but are also cut off from our own bodies--a kind of cultural dementia. The rational human globule has become sick, stunted, and unable to cope with climate change, the pathology of artificial intelligence, and the multitudes of other maladies crashing around us. Yet Berman sees a backlash on the horizon as the younger generation is becoming more cognizant that the American Dream is actually a nightmare, from which they are beginning to awaken. This book is a fabulous addition to Berman’s collection of essays on American culture and is an inspiration for authentic creative thinking about our future."<br/>— Joel Magnuson is an economist and author of several books, the most recent of which is The Dharma and Socially Engaged Buddhist Economics (2022).<br/>Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.